While Intel Corp has confirmed two security flaws - "Meltdown and "Spectre" - in its chips that were vulnerable to hacking the company's CEO Brian Krzanich has allayed fears of any data breach".

Microsoft's move follows Intel last week warning users that numerous firmware updates it had released for Spectre were causing instability problems - including frequent rebooting. Big names like Apple, Amazon, Google and Microsoft were ready relatively quickly, but most everyone else was left racing to fix or mitigate the flaws.

Intel notified Chinese companies about security flaws in its processor chips, according to some sources. "We understand that Intel is continuing to investigate the potential impact of the current microcode version ..."

Today's update i.e KB4078130 is available for all supported versions of Windows operating system and it can be only downloaded from Microsoft's Update Catalog. With both hardware vendors struggling to develop reliable updates, Microsoft has been forced to take the unprecedented step of issuing multiple emergency Windows patches in an attempt to contain the disruption to end users. Windows 7 Service Pack 1Windows 8.1Windows 10 and more.

The Chinese Government monitor these conversations and could potentially have exploited these security flaws.

Detailed at this link, Microsoft's patch KB4078130 will disable Intel's mitigation against Spectre variant 2. Many different generations of Intel chips were suffering such problems, including its latest processors, codenamed Ivy Bridge, Sandy Bridge, Skylake, Kaby Lake, Broadwell and Haswell. (That's the type of vulnerability that applies to Spectre and Meltdown.) That's KB4073119, and it outlines PowerShell scripts to check vulnerability protections, and registry tweaks to enable or disable them. Earlier reports claimed Intel is having being warned of the flaws by Google late previous year itself though it came to be known to all in early January.